Toyota's helpful robot (and other things we didn't cover)

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[Credit: Toyota]

Happy Monday! It’s the beginning of the work week, which means the first of this week’s installments of GeekBytes. For September 24, Ben Heck helps your plants grow, a new robot helps the elderly, and another bot lets you get your game on.

Looking for a way to help your houseplants grow better? Ben Heck thinks you should rotate them. Of course, this is Ben we’re talking about, so he made an automatic indoor plant rotator. This device makes it so plants catch the sun from all angles, which in turn helps them grow more evenly (no more funky-looking houseplants bending toward the light—hooray!). The rotator is made up of a motor and timer that sets when the plant needs moving around.

Toyota’s Robots help the elderly in their homes [Toyota]

Looks like Toyota is keen to help out elderly citizens in addition to getting people from point A to point B. The company’s newest machine isn’t a car, but a 70 pound Human Support Robot. It’s aimed at people who or require assistance around their homes—due to age or other health issues—by helping them with simple but straining household chores, like closing the curtains or picking things up. It’s good at these kinds of tasks thanks to its two-foot-long telescopic arm. [via Engadget]

If you’re anything like Lou, you might not have enough space to have the game room of your dreams. Lout got around his lack of space by building a mechanism that lowers a ping pong table surface from the ceiling and onto his pool table. You can build this system yourself—with a garage door and a bit of home automation know-how—using Lou’s video tutorial [via Hack A Day],